Lingering Blue
by Genis Aurion
Summary: [Oneshot, light slash]. Submission 007 for the KK Archive! In which Kyle reflects on Kenny's multiple deaths.


Submission 007 for the awsm KyleKenny archive  
Yes, I already have a Sub 008. I forgot 007, so sue me… actually, don't.

**Lingering Blue  
**_Zakuyoe_

The wind pushes past me with a crisp, chilling touch.

How long has it been?  
What've I been doing all this while?

The moments around me have flown by so quickly, yet with each thing I've come across I've found myself being less and less caring for what's around me.

Stan's tried comforting me. But seeing as that dickhead hasn't talked to me since we left high school, he couldn't do much.

…Cartman's tried too, but—well, he's incapable of much human emotion, especially remorse, grieving, and anything else he probably _should_ have.  
So he's a lost case, too.

Though… in the hours that have passed by, I've realized one thing: I didn't exactly care much back then, either.

-

I was so young when it first happened.

It was July 4th. The four of us—me, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman—were gathered around a small box, and though we all knew what was inside we still found the box difficult to open.

"Open it!" Stan had cried, his voice being much more high-pitched than it is today—after all, we were all about four, at the time.

And Kenny did just that. Our eyes marveled at the rockets and fireworks in front of us. How we had managed to get our hands on them; at this point I don't even remember. All I remember is our eagerness to light them up, to see what colors they'd turn out to be, to dance at the sight of them, to turn off the lights and see how much they'd brighten the room….

…and then just like that, Kenny died.

I remember staring into his eyes—they were still open, and they scarred a brilliant blue into the back of my mind. For a four-year-old, I guess you could say I was shocked… but not enough.

"Oh no, they killed Kenny!" Stan had cried out, pointing to the rockets.

"You meanies!" was my own trembling voice seconds later.

We were all somewhat saddened—except Cartman, who insisted on lighting more rockets before our parents got home. Kenny, only four…. But then, remarkably, much to our disbelief, Kenny stood up, asked why we were all staring at him, and then joined Cartman in lighting more rockets.

That's my downfall. After that first time, I took each of his deaths very lightly. Stan and Cartman did the same. We'd always make it a joke whenever Kenny died:

"Oh my God, they killed Kenny!"  
"You bastards!"

…and we'd always tease Kenny about how he'd die next. A tree falling on him, getting struck by lightning… his deaths always seemed to be accidental.

And then… one of his deaths wasn't.

Stan and I were in school, commenting on Kenny's absence. In our minds I knew we both thought he was skipping school. He hadn't died again, we knew, or else we would've noticed.

Someone came into our classroom, asking for Stan and me. We looked at each other, confused—we hadn't done anything wrong! Seeing our parents at the office made us all the more confused, but we said nothing.

And then… we heard Kenny was dying.

No, not dead. Dying.

Admittedly it was a lot different than all the deaths he'd had before. Most of the time he had died accidentally. He didn't really suffer pain in his deaths, so neither did us in the aftermath. Besides, he always came back within a few days, at max.

But this was different. He was in pain. We passed by Cartman's house… Cartman was the one skipping, not Kenny… and then the three of us went to visit him….

Stan had run out. Seeing Kenny like that was painful, even for us.

I was the only one who could bear staying by his side. The three of us had taken death for granted. We had always considered Kenny's deaths as trivial, nothing more…. But now, at Kenny's side, I couldn't see how we could've even laughed at death, before.

It was painful. I'm not sure how many times I need to stress that, but it was.

Cartman had showed even the littlest amount of passion toward the boy—he cried a little.

I talked to Kenny a little while before dying. He was still happy—in pain, but happy—at the fact that someone was still there. The whole time he kept asking for Stan, but I had nothing to tell him; Stan wasn't there.

Kenny died.

At his funeral I couldn't help but to be branded by those eyes, those blue eyes I had seen in his last living moment. Yet there was something about them; they seemed less lively, even when he was happy, and it was more of a faded blue. Throughout the service—it was a Catholic mass, and I really didn't care much about it (I was only there for Kenny)—I couldn't help but to wonder if Kenny would ever come back, if this death would be different than the others.

If I—we had lost Kenny forever.

I have no idea how long I had waited for Kenny to come back. We had tried befriending Butters, and then Tweek, in our attempt to get over Kenny, but personally I never found it to work. I don't think Cartman and Stan felt the same way I did; when I asked Stan if he ever thought about Kenny, I had gotten a rather cold reply:

"Of course I do, dude. But it's just pointless dwelling over the past, so stop being a wuss and live the present."

Stan was probably eight or nine when he said that. Somehow, I think he was just quoting his dad.

And then, it happened: Kenny came back.

After months and months of waiting, Kenny came back. I smiled in relief but said nothing aloud; neither Stan nor Cartman seemed to react any differently. It was almost as if they had forgotten the pain he had gone through, as if they were treating his as another trivial death….

I did something I shouldn't have. I began to treat his death the same way.

From Kenny's first unintentional death I learned that he came back even after those deaths. With him, I treated all his deaths equally—it didn't matter if he died intentionally or on purpose; I slipped back into my habits of having fun every time he died.

One time he entered a vegetative state, and Stan and I bickered with Cartman so much that we made national television—all without caring about Kenny.

As we grew on his deaths grew less frequent, and sometimes I'd even joke around with him, suggesting that he hurry up and die already so he could give all of us a good laugh. Even now I'm not so sure what drove me to say such things, and I'm sure he was hurt when we said things like that to him.

If he were hurt at all, he didn't show us. He'd die, we'd laugh, and later he'd come back. I don't think any of us noticed at the time how it was taking increasingly longer for him to come back—first it had been a matter of hours, but he was slowly stretching two weeks periods of being absent. I'm sure he didn't know it either, being as there's no sense of time in hell or heaven or wherever he goes each time he dies… at least, I think.

If only I had known what was really going on.

-

Two days before our graduation from high school, Stan and I got into a fight.

We'd had the fight before; Stan believed that, for a school project, I had chosen Wendy to make a move on her. I had insisted that I only chose her because she knew about the environment more than anyone else in the class, but Stan refused to believe me.

Why we had a project two days before our graduation, no one really knew. Our Environmental Science teacher insisted that as we entered our college years we should be more active in issues that affect our society, and so in an attempt to convince us she had assigned a project. But really, that still didn't explain why she gave it to us two days before graduating….

I wish she hadn't, though.

We bickered for that day, and then the next. After school Stan had gone raging mad—he, apparently, still had feelings for the girl, despite how many times she had rejected her. I pleaded with him still, explaining that I'd never date my friend's ex-girlfriend, but I had made the mistake of telling Stan to stop trying to have Wendy.

He threw a punch at me. It stung.

And that's when Kenny came in.

He told the both of us to stop, but Stan was seeing red. My cheeks flared with pain but I did not fight; it wasn't worth it.

Stan taunted me. He said that if I were to get together with Wendy, it would be totally gay because we're both girls, and so badly I wanted to prove to him that _he_ was the girl, not me.

He tried to throw another punch at me, but Kenny restrained him. It was now the both of us against him, two people trying to prove some sense into the paranoia-stricken Stan.

And then, in his rage, Stan punched Kenny and threw the blonde off of him.

I remember watching. His eyes widened at the impact, the blues in his eyes all the paler, as he connected with a tree and slumped to its root. Stan turned to me, but I didn't care; I ran to Kenny's side, making sure he was okay.

He wasn't.

"Oh my God!" Stan exclaimed, to himself mostly. "I killed Kenny…!"

"You bastard!" I cried after him, but a hand on my wrist diverted my attention.

"I'm fine," Kenny said quietly. "Really, I am."

"No you're not!" I snapped, reaching my hand to his back. "God, Kenny, you're bleeding!"

"I'm fine," he insisted, but his voice was faltering as he spoke. "Kyle, look at me." I bit my lip and complied, barely managing to look into his eyes. The brilliant blue… wasn't there. I was looking into almost-grey eyes now, the emptiness…. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine…."

Kenny died. Again.

There was a moment of silence around us. Many onlookers had created a circle around the tree, Stan now among them. Where my urge to start caring for Kenny's deaths came from; I did not know.

But I could not cry. I couldn't.

"Kyle, I'm sorry, dude, I—"

"NO!" I yelled, staring daggers at my ex-best-friend. "You killed Kenny! I don't ever wanna see your fucking face again, Marsh! EVER!"

-

I didn't talk to him after that. I saw him at graduation, but I made sure to avoid him.

I moved on to college. I had no idea if I'd ever see Kenny again; the last time he had died, he had been missing for two months. This time… I only hoped he came back.

It was in my years at Harvard that I began to grow up. I vowed to never take death for granted, that even if Kenny died in a comical manner I'd never take it lightly. I owed it to him; if Stan and I had never fought, he might've not gone away….

Twelve years after my graduation, Kenny found me.

I was thirty years old, and I lived in Boston; but I had been visiting my parents for a week. Ike was telling me about his new girlfriend when the doorbell had rung, and the frown on my mother's face had told me she wasn't expecting guests.

I found myself leaping into his arms. He gave me the goofiest smile and carried me back into my parents' house.

"I feel like a couple coming back from their wedding," Kenny joked, whispering so only I could hear him. "So when do you want your housewarming gift?"

He stayed at our house for the rest of the day. In the evening he took me to his house—decent, better than his family's, but still low class—and we talked about what I had missed. He had been gone for three years, as I had found out, and he had spent the last twelve years working insane shifts to afford a house to make sure he was stable.

And somehow that had caused me to break down. I explained to him my guilt after the incident, how I vowed to not take his deaths lightly. I even offered my home to him, which he later took after much convincing.

I only cared that Kenny was alive. I didn't want him to die again.

When I was about thirty-five, I expressed those feelings to Kenny. "Death's gonna get you eventually, Kyle," he said with a smile as he set the table. "If it's time for me to die again, then I've got no choice, right?"

"You _can't_ die!" I exclaimed. "Last time you were gone for three years! If you die then…." My voice faltered, coming to a whisper. "Y-you might not… come back."

"I know," Kenny replied, and we left it at that. He welcomed inside his girlfriend and we ate dinner in silence. Afterwards I left the two to their privacy in the living room, leaving them to watch their movie undisturbed as I did my work upstairs. I couldn't accept the idea of Kenny dying again, I couldn't….

At one in the morning Kenny knocked on my door. "Still up?" he asked at the door frame.

I nodded. "Christie still here?" He shook his head. "Suppose I should be getting back to bed."

"Hold up, there," Kenny said, blocking the door, and I frowned. "I know you're upset about the whole… me dying thing."

"No I'm not."

"Bullshit." He smiled, folding his arms across his chest. "You've never been a good liar, Kyle, never have. Me, on the other hand…." He allowed his eyes to wonder, and I sighed.

"I'm sorry," I said pathetically, "I was a lot younger then… I've grown up. I won't make fun of you dying anymore."

"I know you won't," he said quietly. "I'm just afraid about what you said… how I might never come back." The silence between us was unwelcoming, and it hurt more that knowing in the back of my mind that I might lose Kenny.

"I'd rather die," I muttered to myself. Then, to him: "Why couldn't I die for you?"

"Die… for me?" he asked slowly, but he shook his head. "Kyle, don't say that."

"But I mean it!" I exclaimed. "You've died way too many times for your own good! If I… if I could die to save your life… I'd do it, Ken, I really would!" Surely if anyone else were listening to our conversation they'd think we were insane—who knows, maybe Kenny did too….

I felt his hands upon my shoulders, but I didn't look up. "Kyle… if you die, you wouldn't come back either…. And that means as much to me as me dying does to you." He kissed the top of my head and forced my head to meet his. "Doesn't that mean anything to you, either?"

"I—I…" but my eyes were lost in his eyes. How long ago it felt, that day in kindergarten when I had first noticed the brilliance of his bright blue eyes; now they had faded to a light grey, almost impossible to see…. Was there even life left in his eyes, the eyes of blue that had scarred my life?

"I've experienced death, already," he said, nodding his head. "I'm not scared of it."

"But—"

"Kyle,"—and he had said my name with such finality that I immediately grew quiet. "You said yourself to not take death so lightly, didn't you? Why've you changed your mind now?"

I said no more.

-

At the age of thirty-nine, Kenny died again.

Even four years past that conversation, I remember what he's told me. In the back of my mind I still wish I could've bargained with death my life over his. But Kenny wouldn't have wanted that, I think.

The air blows a cold wind against my cheek, the same cheek Stan had thrown a punch at me… it feels cruel; the flow of time, the way life works sometimes, it all makes me wish Stan and I had never had that argument.

That's why I can't bring myself to forgiving Stan.

Yet that day… that day caused me to care for Kenny. I cared for him more than anyone. I wanted him to live so badly…. Coming home from work every day pains my heart, how no voice echoes throughout the house when I open the garage door. At the table my eyes linger upon the empty seat Kenny would always sit at; in the living room I glance at the armchair Kenny would always prop himself in.

I miss his smile, his cheeriness, the blues of his eyes—I miss Kenny.

And somehow I can tell… after this death, he's not coming back.

_**- fin -**_

_I think the ending sucks, but whatever. I hope you enjoyed it anyway, and please review._

**_Zakuyoe's KK Archive:_**  
_001 - Holiday-Soaked Irony  
002 - Maybe One Day  
003 - Miles  
004 - Scarlet-Stained Letters  
005 - Scrabble  
006 - Semitic Rhythm  
007 - Lingering Blue  
008 - 24  
_


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